Conclusion

Lessons Learned

We came to this article with a few hopes. One of these was that today’s high-speed LCD panels would be sufficient for gaming, and we’re glad to say that is true. While you’ll still be able to find smearing when you look for it, today’s higher-end panels are fast enough so that you can game at a very high skill level without encountering any problems. We had also come to this article expecting most monitors to be largely similar in performance, but our tests showed that it clearly wasn’t the case. The quality of the associated circuitry and backlight all affect the final picture quality. All of these monitors had similar paper specifications, but in this round-up, there were only two 17” LCD monitors that we would actually buy with our hard-earned cash: the Dell 1703FP (now replaced by the 1704FPV) and the NEC LCD1770NX, and only one of those, the NEC LCD1770NX would we buy for gaming. We think everyone will agree that the importance of having monitor reviews at FiringSquad is paramount.

We still have unanswered questions. It was incredible that the Samsung 915N did as well as it did for both gaming and still images. Without DVI support it’s impossible for FiringSquad to recommend the Samsung 915N, but Hyundai’s ImageQuest L90D+ looks like a potential candidate. With a similar design to the Samsung with the addition of a DVI connector, it is possible that the $370 19” Hyundai may very well be a gaming monitor of choice. Clearly we’ll need to bring more monitors into our labs.

In our future LCD round-ups, we’ll try to move in two directions. We’ve shown you that even today’s best non-DVI monitors are a poor choice, but what we’ll need to explore next is if $250 17” DVI monitors such as the ACER AL1715smd and Sony SDM-S74 can hold their own against the pricier NEC LCD1770NX. How will budget 19” DVI monitors from companies such as Hyundai compete against the flagship 17” monitors? In the same direction of high-end monitors it would be beneficial to explore modern S-IPS panels such as the S-IPS NEC LCD1970NX for gaming and take a closer look at Samsung’s own 1000:1 contrast ratio PVA monitor, the SyncMaster 920T.

Finally, we’ll want to take a look at the best of the best: Eizo’s ColorEdge panels with internal 30-bit color processing, the newly announced high-speed 4 ms Viewsonic Xtreme panels, the Formac Gallery Xtreme line-up featuring a 4th generation 15 ms Fujitsu ColorProof MVA technology, high-speed 16 ms S-IPS panels from Dell, and finally, what of the solo fighter attempting to preserve the flicker that remains of the once strong flame of CRT technology, NEC-Mitsubishi’s $5000, 77 lb, Diamondtron Ultra-Wide-Gamut 22” monitor?

The lights are still on in our benchmarking labs.